Structural Analysis of Cryptographic Sequences using Stringology-Based Fingerprinting

TL;DR

This paper presents a stringology-based fingerprinting framework for analyzing the structural properties of cryptographic sequences, providing insights beyond traditional statistical randomness tests.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pattern-based analysis method that captures structural signatures in cryptographic sequences using stringology techniques.

Findings

Stringology-based analysis reveals measurable structural signatures.

Structural features differ between cryptographic and random sequences.

The approach offers an additional perspective for evaluating cryptographic generators.

Abstract

Cryptographic primitives such as stream ciphers,Pseudorandom Number Generators (PRNGs), and block cipher modes produce sequences that are designed to be statistically indistinguishable from random data. As a result, the traditional evaluation techniques therefore rely primarily on statistical randomness tests to assess the quality of generated sequences. While these tests verify global statistical properties, they do not address whether structural characteristics of sequences can reveal information about the underlying generator. In this paper, we introduce a stringology-based fingerprinting, (SBF) framework for the structural analysis of cryptographic sequences. The proposed SBF framework interprets cryptographic outputs as symbolic strings and applies pattern-based feature extraction to capture structural statistics such as substring frequency distributions, recurrence patterns, and entropy characteristics. These structural features are aggregated into fingerprint vectors that characterize sequence generators. The experimental evaluation is conducted using datasets composed of Cipher-Generated Sequences (CGS) and Uniformly Random Sequences (URS). The results demonstrate that stringology-based pattern analysis can reveal measurable structural signatures across different sequence sources. Although these signals do not imply practical cryptographic weaknesses, they provide an additional analytical perspective for evaluating the structural behavior of cryptographic generators.